Monday June 20, 2011

IT cloud services will expand at a compound annual growth rate
(CAGR) of 27.6%, from $21.5 billion in 2010 to $72.9 billion in
2015, market research firm IDC forecasts. Having emerged as the
critical, core infrastructure necessary to realize convergence,
Cloud computing's impact will reach far beyond IT spending,
however, IDC notes.

"Cloud
services are interconnected with and accelerated by
other disruptive technologies, including mobile devices, wireless
networks, big data analytics, and social networking," said Frank
Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. "Together,
these technologies are merging into the industry's third major
platform for long-term growth.

Investment in public IT cloud services is
expanding at more than 4x the rate of worldwide IT spend as a
whole, according to IDC, leading the research firm to forecast that
$1 out of every $7 spent "on packaged software, servers, and
storage offerings in 2015 will be related to the cloud model." IT
firms that succeed in the cloud services segment of the overall IT
market will "likely be the new power brokers of the IT industry,"
IDC says.

Other findings in IDC's, "Worldwide and Regional Public IT
Cloud Services 2011-2015 Forecast," include:

In 2015, public cloud services will account
for 46% of net new growth in overall IT spending in five key
product categories - applications, application development and
deployment, systems infrastructure software, basic storage, and
servers.

Software-oriented cloud services (SaaS) will
account for roughly three quarters of all spending on public cloud
IT services throughout the forecast. This includes all three
software-oriented cloud categories, not just applications. Spending
on hardware-oriented cloud services (servers and storage) will be
largely driven by SaaS providers building out their
infrastructure.

The United States will dominate overall spending throughout the
forecast period, with nearly 50% of all public IT cloud
services revenues coming from the U.S. in 2015. But
regions outside the U.S. will show much stronger growth as cloud
services adoption accelerates. In particular, IDC found that there
are more cloud services vendors and greater end user spending in
Asia/Pacific and Western Europe than previously thought.